The film and the public (1955)

A MISCELLANY OF FILMS one. Like the boy we just watch it fascinated and deafened by the crashing and clanking sounds it produces with a ringing whirl of twisting chains. The editing here by Helen van Dongen is superb. Then, after all this, the well blows off its gas and steam like a great tumult of mire, filling the sky with darkness. It is easy to say what this film is not, less easy to say what it is. The finest character is the father. The boy himself, though he is the pivot of the film since its general treatment is conducted from his point of view, is shy to the point of being rather colourless, compared, for example, to young Moana or the fisherman's son on Aran. The film structurally is somewhat thin, a simple linking together of episodes. Yet it stands or falls on its creation of an atmosphere of place and people. Here I think it succeeds, supported by fine photography, fine editing, and a fine musical score by Virgil Thomson, who wrote the music for The Plow that broke the Plains and The River. Flaherty never lost his feeling for the job during nearly thirty years of film-making. ON THE TOWN, 1949 Production: M.G.M. Producer: Arthur Freed. Direction : Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen. Script : Adolph Green and Betty Comden. Photography : Harold Rossen. Editor: Ralph E. Winters. Art Directors: Cedric Gibbons and Jack Martin Smith. Music : Leonard Bernstein. With Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Betty Garrett, Ann Miller, Jules Munshin, Vera-Ellen. Many American musicals are glorified stage-shows, quickened in tempo by the resources of editing and the possibilities of spectacular presentation available in the studios. But ever since Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers first appeared in Top Hat (1935), the film musical has gradually taken on a shape of its own which has to some extent drawn away from the theatre and made it, at its best, a special kind of art belonging exclusively to the cinema. The Broadway successes are still turned into films, sometimes most engagingly as, for 173